Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review Volumes 32 and 33.djvu/662

 352 Miisetuns and Raree Shows in Antiquity.

floods sweeping over the fields disclosed human bodies of portentous size and the mighty stones they had hurled at one another.^ Plutarch says that the bones of the Amazons were shown at Samos, but these were rightly explained by later writers as those of prehistoric animals. ^ Philostratus enumerates a series of places where such heroic remains were found. ^

One interesting relic of the past age was a Phoenician script said to have been brought by Kadmos to Greece. Herodotos mentions that he himself saw such KaJ/x)/m ypafxfxara in the sanctuary of Ismenian Apollo at Thebes on three tripods dedicated by Amphitryon and his com- panions.* Another tripod was the one which Hesiod, as he tells us himself, won at Chalcis and dedicated to the Muses of Helicon.^ Pausanias says : "Of all the tripods which stood on Helicon, the most ancient is that which Hesiod is said to have received at Chalcis for a song of love." ^ He adds : " They showed me also beside the spring a leaden tablet, very timeworn, on which are engraved the works (of Hesiod)." What would we not give now to possess this tablet, which would be of almost greater interest than any papyrus from the dust heaps of Egypt 1 The same Mucianus who touched the corselet of Amasis in Lindos related that when he was Governor of Lycia he read in a Lycian temple a letter written home from the front by Homer's Sarpedon.'

In the Heraion at Olympia was an inscription even more archaic than the lead tablet of Helicon. This was the quoit of Iphitos, who again established the festival of Zeus

^ Solinus, ix. 6 f. p. 63 M.

2 Plutarch, Quest. Gr., 56; Eugaion, Apud Phot. s.v. vrjis ; Euphorion, Apiid Ael., irepi fciwi', xvii. 28.

3 Philostratus, Her., p. 289 K,


 * Herodotos, v. 58-60 ; Pausanias, ix. 10. 4.


 * Hesiod, Works and Days, 650-59.


 * Pausanias, ix. 31. 3. '' Pliny, N.H., xiii. 88.